Re: Correction in documentation

Upon receiving your response I redid the tests. There was a mix up in my
syntax when testing the escape sequences alongside `echo` which I realised
going through the documentation again.

Thank you for your reply and my apologies for a false alarm.

On Fri, 2 Jan, 2026, 19:37 Greg Wooledge, <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 16:34:59 +0530, Anshuman Khanna wrote:
> > On this
> > <
> https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/ANSI_002dC-Quoting.html
> >
> > page
>
> (which describes the $'...' quoting form)
>
> > of Bash documentation, it is mentioned that to type an ASCII character we
> > can write it in its octal notation. However, there is a mistake here.
> >
> > The documentation says that the character must be written as `\nnn` where
> > "nnn" are octal digits. The actual working requires that we type as
> `\0nnn`
> > where "nnn" are octal digits. Without the `\0` "nnn" isn't recognised as
> an
> > octal representation.
>
> Your claim is incorrect.
>
> hobbit:~$ printf %s $'\1abc' | hd
> 00000000  01 61 62 63                                       |.abc|
> 00000004
> hobbit:~$ printf %s $'\10abc' | hd
> 00000000  08 61 62 63                                       |.abc|
> 00000004
>
> \1 and \10 are both recognized as octal values.  This works in bash 5.2,
> 5.3 and 2.05b, and though I didn't test any other versions just now,
> I'm pretty confident it didn't change in between.
>